I'm actually not a big specialist in electronics, there's a lot of people beyond this little project, so I'm just 1/100 part, just the car's mine and I was looking for the right people for almost a year and first of all I had a tenacious wish to accomplish it.

We were able to start the engine just by shoting down the pin 8 on EWS, which is responsible for the clutch, but than we had all the lights on and nothing worked. Still the engine surprisingly ran on full power. We called a guy, who solved everything even with stock harness by tipping some default values to ECU, I don't exactly know what he's done, I wasn't even there, as he done all the stuff, but for him it was a 30 min task.

Regarding similar conversion on 4.8is, I don't know about the logic unit of xdrive, I think you have to go to a good programmer (like I did), which can transfer the data from the x-drive ECU taken from X3 manual and adapt them for X5. I

It's doable even with x-dirve, but it's an easier task with full mechanical unit like NV125 on M62-powered X5s.

The other thing is, if you intend to do it in USA, only the CAD developement of the connecting haousing will cost you a fortune, producing of casting moulds even with given CAD data will cost you another fortune....

So I did both in Russia (I'm russian by nationality).

But it wasn't possible in Russia, to produce the connecting shaft, because the slots on the shaft must be hardened by very special process, I let do one and tested it on a special machine and it was broken, because the metal in russia is shitty and the shaft needs the degree of hardening of 60, which wasn't realizable in Russia.

I met a guy here in Germany, who helped me alot, but even his first prototype was broken under static stress of 550 Nm, which wasn't bad at all, but the current one is capable to hold more than 600 Nm.

If you'd like to do the same thing I can provide you a similar connecting shaft if you give me a blueprint, but that's the most I can do in case of x-dirve and GS6-53BZ (545i) gearbox. But it's doable, of you really want it.

Regards,

Nick